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Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#181

Post by jleyank »

JohnFen wrote: post #154
nomel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate analysts were "gifted" with a two impossibly rare step functions, that will probably never be repeated in our lifetimes: Near 100% -> near 0% percent in office, then 0% percent -> partial% in office. With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion: in whole, humans work better together. It makes you wonder if it's a fundamenta…

> With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion That is, at best, very weak evidence supporting your conclusion. I agree, by the way, that humans do work better together. That doesn't mean, however, that humans work better in an office environment. There are huge drawbacks to that environment that may very well exceed the benefit of p…

Given how I’ve worked and the developers I’ve worked with over the decades, marketeers or managers might work better in bunches but peace and quiet serves the developers. Offices with a door, few interruptions, etc. Rands has talked about being in the zone when working and anything that favours that should be provided by companies interested in software people.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#182

Post by mystraline »

6c696e7578 wrote: post #173
mystraline wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats because Teams is just a frontend to SharePoint Online. SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes. And it's in Electron on top of that, so its 10x slower than a real non-browser application. Ive only rarely seen Microsoft put out actual good software. The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.

> The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software. It was good, but IIS had some faults, can't remember what, they wanted to replace it quickly with 2003. There isn't much wrong with Windows XP, objectively speaking.

Prior to iis 9, if you use the GUI to change a SSL cert of a site, it would change ALL sites to that cert.

You had to use powershell iis commandlet to change per site.

The newest IIS finally fixed that.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#183

Post by ghaff »

adabyron wrote: post #141
ghaff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly saw engagement, collaboration, etc. going down once things switched heavily to video calls (even before COVID) rather than meeting in-person in various ways--especially among people you didn't already know. Of course, in many situations, it's unavoidable. I'm probably not going to hop on an international trip at the drop of a hat--though I certainly attended events. But there's some subset of people that…

I’ve had the opposite effect. Meetings where everyone is on video run so much better. More on task, plus transcriptions & other features dramatically improve the meeting. I can more easily understand accents, read when people talk over each other, ai generated notes and tasks, and I can rewatch parts of the meeting by searching for something said. Also easy to detect who dominates the meeting and who might need to be…

I'm not sure big in-person meetings in rooms are especially useful but eating with people, having discussions in small conference rooms, social events, etc. were. Big online meetings never engaged me much and I certainly almost never rewatched parts of a meeting. And latterly it was sort of "Who are these people" if I hadn't known them before.

I do agree that video conferences that have agendas, collaborative notes, and so forth matured during COVID (though we did them before) but don't require a video meeting.

But people have different preferences.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#185

Post by lovich »

groby_b wrote: post #175
chollida1 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most people like vs code and lots of companies have built on top of it so there must be some quality there that people like.

It's more that there isn't a single credible alternative. So, winning by default, not by merit.

The editor itself, Monaco, is nice enough and I’ve built some browser based ides, with it. Clientele consisting of primarily data scientists seemed to enjoy it

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#186

Post by SvenL »

gamblor956 wrote: post #149
SvenL wrote: post #6

Maybe they don’t even want to rely on Microsoft Teams internally anymore…

MS Teams for video teleconferencing...good. On a Windows PC, and using MS365, by far the easiest to set up ( or change ) a meeting and fewest issues with cameras across multiple devices. (Webex and Zoom are close seconds, Google Meet is a distant last due to constant camera issues.) MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack. M…

I agree with every sentence! I would love to have a native app because the more teams/channels you have, the more resources it’s eating up and it feels pretty slow and laggy. Like a message comes in, you click on the notification and it takes like 15 sec until you can read it.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#187

Post by lawlessone »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #159
yifanl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no question to the quality of Copilot.

I was under the impression GitHub built and maintained that, but perhaps that’s changed… If not I wouldn’t consider it a Microsoft built product like windows etc (yes I’m aware ms owns gh)

everyone that contributed a project to github built it.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#188

Post by jbm »

boringg wrote: post #144
jbm wrote: post #126

Turns out even Microsoft can't get Teams to work.

This kind of commentary is more appropriate for Reddit but in this case I approve.

Yeah, honestly my whole karma score is built from pithy comments about Teams.

Thankfully it no longer crashes Chrome all the time, but everything else is meh. I still can't tag people in Japanese. The security settings are a trap for poor quality system admins and checkbox checkers. The meetings crash, the screen sharing only allows one way (so no easy pair programming), etc..

I much prefer working with slack and google meet like I did at my last job.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#189

Post by margalabargala »

yifanl wrote: post #157
PUSH_AX wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Microsoft built anything in the last decade that isn’t of questionable quality/user experience?

There's no question to the quality of Copilot.

I'm sure there are some people out there somewhere who haven't tried it and so still think it could be good.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#190

Post by zero_shift »

At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs.

People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best.

The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared).

I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO... C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate and geographically limiting their talent pool. Whilst making workers more tired and less productive.

I still have no idea where it comes from. My best guess is that nobody at that level wants to break ranks with the "collective wisdom" of "investors", which creates a kind of groupthink.

(An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.)

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